Unforseen Landing in Glasgow

The flight from France over the Channel to London was as uneventful as it could be. The day was clear and crisp, and I kept on gazing out of the window down to the many coloured woods of France looking like a giant puzzle. But the uninterrupted blue-black expanse of water I found terribly boring and I badgered my grandmother into a card game of snap. In London, we had to wait an hour for our connecting flight to Inverness which gave my grandmother the perfect excuse for a cup of tea.

The airplane we entered had space for 10 passengers and accordingly the hustle and bustle of settling in was over within minutes. In a time when airplanes were still manoeuvred by pilots instead of computers, I was allowed to the cockpit once the plane was safely airborne. I had been told that we were going to see our cousins in Scotland, but at five years old I had already lost track of which cousins these could be, there were so many cousins coming to visit us all the time, and Scotland was a place of fairy tale connected to the good queen Mary who had been beheaded by the bad queen Elizabeth.

As the airplane carried us north, the weather got progressively worse until we finally entered a storm front just short of Glasgow. The little plane was buffeted by wind and rain streamed over the side windows. It was pitch dark outside and my grandmother had turned on a light to read her book. I watched the raindrops on the window pane racing against each other doing bets on the winner against myself. Then lightening lighted up the clouds from within and the boom of thunder could be felt rather than heard in the plane.

The next time, lightening struck true and hit the plane making all the lights inside go off at the same time. In a calm voice the stewardess informed the passengers that we had been struck by lightning and that we would land in Glasgow in a few minutes. As this was considered an emergency landing, would the passengers please take their pillows and put their heads down forward on it protecting it with their arms. Her calm somehow conveyed to everybody that we were going to land at Glasgow airport and this were just instructions in case something went amiss with the landing after all.

The landing was a shock. It felt like we had been thrown from high up in a tin can onto concrete. Once the plane had come to a bumpy standstill, silence reigned. Into this silence, the stewardess managed to sound bored instructing the passengers to leave the plane immediately and not to take any of their belongings with them. Getting off the plane wasn’t any better than the landing; we stood in a soggy field and no light could be seen in any direction. About five minutes later, moving lights could be seen as what turned out to be a tractor made its way towards us.

The farmer was kind enough to invite everybody over to the farm house, so we made our slogging way from the field towards it. Once there, we all were bundled up in warm blankets. The grownups all got some tea and something else in a glass which my grandmother didn’t allow me to taste, and I got a hot chocolate. After about an hour, a cavalcade of cars arrived at the farm house bringing some officials from the company as well as a doctor and a nurse. When it was clear that nobody was hurt, the cars took us to a hotel in Glasgow.

What is the thing that to this day makes this adventure so special to me? The hot chocolate, I never had had chocolate to drink before.

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